I don't like Americans

I’ve said earlier that I love America, and I do. I love American music, American writing, American style. I like everywhere that I’ve been in America. It’s an amazing, gorgeous, bountiful land – there is no more beautiful, richly textured, exciting, or diverse country anywhere on Earth – from the Rockies to the Rogue River, from the big shoulders of Chicago and New York to the warm, welcoming neighborliness and quiet grace of it’s thousands of small towns. America has a history of greatness, with a spirit that combines the intrepid explorer, the tireless inventor, and the ruthless capitalist; the optimistic, ambitious and brilliant new-world-building visions of Hamilton and Jefferson, and the profound integrity and gritty, manly strength of Washington and Lincoln. A can-do, no-BS, I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it, don’t-give-me-none-of-your-crap foundation that I love. We have fostered the greatest intellectuals, scientists, thinkers, and innovators of modern times. We have a legal system whose architecture I deeply admire and appreciate, whose protections of personal liberty and freedom are among our greatest assets, and whose culture of fairness is the foundation of a good life.

But, that said, I can’t stand America. It is filled with incredibly rude and stupid people, and getting worse by the day. It is completely incompetent. It deserves (and is rapidly marching into) the ash-heap of history.

What was my first clue, you ask? Well, I’ve always felt this way, so it’s been a gradual elevation of this feeling over my counter-balancing affection for my homeland. But perhaps one clear milestone was the Katrina experience. That, for me, was an unwelcome and unpleasant awakening: a disillusionment that has dominated my attitude over time. It showed me that even in the face of crisis, Americans are completely unable to get anything done, or even to formulate an idea of what should be done. We ran around with heads up our collective asses for a few weeks, while old people and children wandered the streets, thirsty and homeless and uncared-for. Then the politicos elbowed onto the scene, with their crocodile tears and canned outrage, barfing up paper and proclamations and media bullshit by the ton for awhile, eventually resulting in a plan to dump hundreds of billions of nonexistent dollars into the open hands of insider-connected reconstruction vendors, who would squander and mis-manage and skim it in partnership with their vast ecosystem of corrupt and brain-dead politicians and other hangers-on – unions, illegal immigrants, overseers, consultants, and all the other players in the shell game to nowhere that is modern America.

How can one have any faith in a country that would handle itself that way? A great city, dead, under our noses. A gigantic sink-hole of precious money and attention and resources, with zero result. It’s the same story we see every day, a banal story of potholes and wasted association fees and incompetent school administration and so on, but writ large and visible – a beacon of our downfall, impossible to ignore.

It is no exaggeration to say that there is not a single competent public official in America. There is not a single government program that works – not one. In every case, it would be better to have done nothing official at all, and to let people fend for themselves. (I may have to make a single exception – which proves the rule – for the Forest Service and National Parks – not because Katrina works there :-) but because it’s a relic from an older time, when government operated as the instrument of the social compact, and is relatively unchanged from that period, left alone in relatively competent and caring pursuit of it’s obscure and harmless mandate.) But people get the government they deserve. Americans as a breed have become stupid and nasty, pure and simple. They don’t know any better. Their politicians are themselves.

Yesterday, I had to fly cross-country, which always reminds me forcefully of what America has become. The entire experience was one long drowning in a sea of insane stupidity. The ticket counter agent slouching and smirking, wandering off to spend a few minutes talking about nothing, gabbing with her buddies, while a line of travelers helplessly re-checked their watches and shifted from one leg to the other, waiting for their turn to go through the mind-boggling and random rat-maze that getting to a plane has become. I actually had plenty of time, but the inconsideration of the counter people for those who might well miss their flights, who still had the hideously inefficient luggage drop-off and the endless, pointless security checkpoints to get through was enough to make me scream. It takes them minutes to do what should take seconds – if anyone with a brain had bothered to think when they set up their systems, or if anyone in management were actually concerned with results, or if the stupid counter people actually had enough wherewithal to be able to add two numbers, or understand what anyone said to them, or to care.

And they’re rude and uncultured and unpleasant and ugly while they do it. Sorry, but they are. People naturally are beautiful – in their natural, unspoiled state, they are like dogs, all good all the time – but people in airports are disgusting. Obese, reeking of hamburgers and unwashed hands, with strangely streaked hair, and ill-fitting, obscene clothes, unable to spell or add, unable to understand or express a simple sentence. The banal, unself-conscious ugliness of most Americans is overwhelmingly obvious, and a sad change from the dignity, capability, and self-respect of our predecessors.

Then, the security “process” – the mad monstrosity, whose sole aim is to employ the very stupidest among us, to slow the pace of social unrest and provide an income stream for the dramatically increasing population of uneducated, unambitious, and unimaginitive among us, who truly have nothing better to do than stumble into their Old Navy clothes, eat a McBreakfast, drop the kids off at DayCare4U, and go off to their job, where they will be paid to mumble, look at pieces of paper, take breaks, and be arbitrary. Later, no doubt, they will be found blobbing on the dirty couch at home, screeching at American Idol, text messaging their votes, calling their friends on their cell phones, or popping down to the mall to gawk at bigger screen TVs and scarf down more food at the Food Court. Lord help us! – why has it been so easy for us to slip into Brave New World?

Every single time I go through this process, I am insulted and amazed. It seems hard to believe that none of this was in place just 5 short years ago – that we have somehow been acculturated to accept this, to not find it shocking, to not rebel against the monstrosity that would impose it. I don’t accept it at all. I tell people all along the way – with a smile and a look that says “you deserve better; you don’t have to do this” – how stupid it is, and how insulting I find it, and how much I recommend that they not allow themselves to be tools of it’s bizarre and dehumanizing force. And although I’ve been through it hundreds of times now, it never fails to shock me – like the woman yesterday who would launch into her memorized 2-minute spiel about what to do with more than 3-ounce bottles of liquid whenever she spied what looked like a bag or other possible container of liquid goods. She spoke in the “I’m only a cog in the machine” voice of a prison guard, loudly reciting the canned Miranda Rights speech with no understanding or intent, not looking at anyone, without any connection to reality at all. She would squint at the boarding passes of old ladies and 5-year old children, grabbing their IDs, mouthing out their names letter by letter as she matched the ID to the boarding pass. Oh my Lord! We live in a world where we pay people to do this baloney all day long, as if they were bits in a software program, and we wonder at the world that results!

And then the rudeness and smelliness and overwhelmingly dehumanized spirit of the airport restaurants and lounges, of the flight attendants who want nothing more than to do nothing, to get to the end of the damn flight and go watch some TV, of the security guards whose only function in an emergency would be to get in the way of anyone who actually knew what to do. The people at the Starbucks who hate coffee and hate people; who are forced to make idiotic, over-priced concoctions for people who merely want to occupy their time with unwanted indulgences, who live in a kind of over-stimulated mindlessness, bouncing from one routinized activity to the next, with no appreciation, no awareness, and no humanity, and not wanting any.

America is filled with people with butts too big to fit into their chairs, ignoring their children who scream and throw potato chips at passersby, talking loudly into their sleek, gadgety cell phones about the sexual episodes of their cousins and their favorite TV stars. People who push in line, who whirl around with elbows flying, coffee spilling, without looking, who squeeze past those waiting patiently, with no consciousness of shame; indeed, rightly perceiving themselves as paragons of their world. Men with ugly shoes mismatched to their sloppy clothes, bellies sloshing over their belts, iPod earbuds jammed into their ears, programming their ant-brains, sunglasses perched stupidly on their necks, stumbling from one sit-down to the next. Women with glossy blond wigs, garish lipstick and waxy foundation smeared across their unhealthy skin, fake smiles and cold eyes ruining their faces, which emerge turtle-like from the rolls of fat hanging off their flabby necks.

Did I mention that they lost my luggage too? Criminy...

Has anyone seen the “Willoughby” Twilight Zone episide?